


Bestirred in Sleep

by Gileonnen



Category: Henry IV Part 1 - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - World War I, Gen, Haunted Landscapes, Huddling For Warmth, Letters from Home, Wet Hotspur
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-20
Updated: 2011-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-27 15:09:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/297175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The three of them have draped a tarpaulin over their bit of the trench--or what Archie calls a tarpaulin, although it's scarcely better than a thin cotton sheet worn translucent with cold sweat and the steady friction of night-tremors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bestirred in Sleep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [speakmefair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Craiglockhart AU](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/5922) by speakmefair. 



The three of them have draped a tarpaulin over their bit of the trench--or what Archie calls a tarpaulin, although it's scarcely better than a thin cotton sheet worn translucent with cold sweat and the steady friction of night-tremors. It soaks through almost at once and drips on them as they try to wrest a few hours' sleep from the fag-end of the night, all three curled tight together like puppies dozing in a plashet.

Harry's cigarettes are wet. Harry's _everything_ is wet, and he doesn't care to sleep when his boots are soaked through from leather to ill-darned stocking. If he pulled off his boots, he'd find his feet wrinkled up and fungal-smelling about the toes--and that's if they haven't begun to rot.

Everything is wet, and their tarpaulin's too damn little, too damn late, and in the oppressive darkness he can still hear the whine of far-off shells falling on some other poor bastards. "Budge up," he tells Archie, kicking his ankle and making him grumble something about kippers. "There's a dry bit under you."

"There isn't a dry bit in the whole of France," Archie replies, nestling deeper into his little nest in the muck. "I'm never complaining about an Edinburgh rain again. It'll be damn _refreshing_ , after this piss."

"Your sodding tarpaulin is dripping in my ear," says Harry. "Now, budge up or I'll throw you out into the piss."

With a gusty sigh, Archie shifts over an inch and indicates the slick earth beside him with an elbow; Harry feels it more than he sees it, in the dimness. Light a match on a dark, rainy night like this, and you're asking for someone to drop a mortar on you. "Good lad."

He slots his hips up behind Archie's, arm over his chest, fitting the two of them them together tight as clenched hands. There's no dry spot under Archie, but at least here the drips from the edge of the tarpaulin aren't getting in Harry's ear, and that's something.

That's something. There isn't much to be had here; something's all he can ask.

"Think we'll be going over soon?" asks Mortimer, on Archie's far side. "It's not that I'm afraid--I'm not afraid of going over--"

"But you'd rather know than not," Archie says. It's a lie they're used to telling Mortimer, this pretending he's not afraid. He hasn't heard from his wife since they came to France, which is understandable seeing as she doesn't speak anything but Welsh, so she doesn't write him letters the way Kate writes Harry; it's easier to go over the top if you know what's waiting at home for you, Archie's given to say (when he and Harry are alone and talking about Mortimer, which is something they do more than they ought). It's easier to be brave if you can kiss your girl's picture and wear her letter folded in your breast pocket, shielded with a handkerchief to keep out the damp.

Kate sends the occasional package of socks, the occasional lopsided hat knit carefully by hand; she sends cigarettes and homemade jam by parcel post. They don't shut out the rain or the bad dreams or the stink of dead men.

"Not until it's gone dry," says Harry, after a moment of listening to the others breathe.

Archie curses and elbows him hard in the gut; the pain lances deep, catches and breaks off somewhere near his kidneys. "Damn you, I'd nearly got to sleep again--"

"You think so, eh? You think they'll wait that long?" asks Mortimer, with a rare note of hope. When his voice has gone high with the strain of whispering, he sounds a little like his sister. The resemblance used to send a knife through Harry, back when they were still green and the war hadn't rotted them bone-deep.

The tarpaulin must have begun to sag down the middle, because the water drips down along that long, sunken line and films Archie's cheeks with rainwater.

"If we wait until it's gone dry, we'll be waiting 'til doomsday," he mutters, fixing a hand in Harry's hair until he's affixed Harry's chin over his shoulder. Their cheeks grate together, grease and day-old beards and the friction of trying to get warm; Archie's breath is hot and wet just beneath Harry's chin, but everything else is cold and wet, and he's in no position to be choosy.

The tarpaulin is dripping into his ear again, and if he hadn't had Archie's hand in his hair and Mortimer's arm snaking over his waist, he'd have climbed up in the inch-thick mud and ripped the whole goddamn thing down--would've seized his gun and gone pounding across No Man's Land screaming like a damn berserker until the krauts gunned him down in the middle. This kind of madness strikes him at times, at two or three in the morning, when he's flirting with sleep and listening to shells fall God only knows where; better to die alone, on terms he chooses, and at least have the certainty of death to anchor him.

It'd be cleaner that way, he thinks. It would be the kind of death he wouldn't mind people hearing about.

Archie's hand is in his hair, though, and Mortimer's hand is on his waist, and huddled beneath their ill-made tent in the muck, the three of them are warmer than they'd be out under their rain.

"Found that dry bit yet?" mutters Archie. "Could've sworn it was under me, you said."

"Must've been mistaken."

"Could've _sworn._ "

"Let a man get to sleep," Mortimer grouses.

He doesn't sound like a man trying to sleep, with that high, anxious note in his voice. When his hand finds Harry's chin in the darkness, for a moment the fingers clench there and tug at the skin. To make sure Harry's not a corpse come to lie with them in the darkness--to make sure he's real, present, _alive_ in the way nothing's really alive here.

Mortimer is a Shropshire boy, and he doesn't know what to do with the restless dead. Archie and Harry, though, grew up on the border, casting stones at each other across the Tweed; they grew up on land thick with death, scampering in their boyhood over a thousand unnamed soldiers' graves. Archie knows better than to think they're safe when the mortars aren't falling on their particular segment of the trench.

Harry will scoff at spirits, but on nights when mortality draws near, he turns to that warm, solid creature that's Archibald Douglas, and he burrows into the greasy heat of him like a boy burrowing beneath the blankets for shelter.

It doesn't drive the ghosts away, but it gets him through the night.

It's something. It's all he can ask.


End file.
